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One of life's certainties, up there with death and taxes, is that your battery will wear out over time. How much time depends on how well you care for it. According to Russ Reynolds of Batteries Plus, a typical notebook battery lasts for around 500 charge/discharge cyclesbetween 18 months and three years of normal use. To get as close as possible to the latter number, remove the battery whenever your notebook is plugged into an outlet (as when you're working at the office or the local coffee shop). If you leave it in, the AC power could cause the battery to overheat and overchargethe most common cause of premature failure, Reynolds says. When running on battery power, use your machine until you get a low-battery warning, then let the battery recharge fully. That'll keep the total number of recharges (remember, you get only about 500) to a minimum. Reynolds also recommends storing both your notebook and its battery in cool, dry, well-ventilated locations, as hot environments can also diminish battery longevity.

Baby Your Battery, Part 2

We love Standby mode as much as anybody: It lets us start up and shut down our laptops in a matter of seconds rather than minutes. However, Standby consumes a smidge of power, meaning your battery slowly continues to drain even while the notebook is "off." Consequently, you burn through its fixed number of charge/discharge cycles that much faster. Avoid this trap by using Hibernate mode instead: It preserves your notebook's current state by writing it to the hard drive as a fileone that requires no power. When you restart the system, Hibernate simply loads the file, returning you to where you left offjust like Standby. It takes a few extra seconds to use Hibernate, but it's as friendly to your battery as shutting down entirely. For more battery tips, see Top Tips to Extend Your Laptop Battery Life.

Reformat the Hard Drive

We can't count the times we've heard friends and family members ask, "Should I buy a new computer? My old one's running really slow." News flash: It's slow because over time, Windows gets bogged down by the digital equivalent of cholesterol: orphaned files, leftover Registry entries, and possibly even spyware and viruses. Fortunately, you can unclog the OS arteries by reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling Windows. It's a bold and time-consuming step, but it will leave you with a zippy, healthy machineperhaps not quite as quick as the day you unboxed it, but a good deal less sluggish than pre-reformat.

In most cases, you can perform this surgery using the PC manufacturer's system-restore CDjust boot it and follow the step-by-step instructions. Before you do, however, make sure to offload all your documents, e-mail, browser bookmarks, and other critical data to a network drive, external drive, or optical discs (CD or DVD). Alas, you can't just clone your hard drive and restore it after the system wipe; it would restore all the problems you had before. Instead, use a backup utility like the Editors' Choicewinning Genie Backup Manager Pro 8.0 to archive your files and settings to any of the aforementioned destinations. Then, after completing the system-restore process, reinstall your apps and restore your data. Presto: Your old, slow system is like new again, and should last a lot longer as a result.